The Vagrants

"Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket. ... Their daughter's life would end on this day."

From its opening lines, the world of Yiyun Li's first novel puts a reader in mind of notable others: Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Kafka's "The Trial," as well as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," wherein a nameless town's annual ritual proves to be the death by stoning of a randomly chosen citizen. A meditation on fate, causality and suffering, "The Vagrants" is not for the fainthearted.

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In a city called Muddy River, in the bled-gray, hysterical paranoia of China post-Mao, post-Gang of Four (1978-79), lives a loosely connected ensemble: schoolteacher Gu and his wife, whose 28-year-old daughter, Shan, is condemned to be executed for counterrevolutionary activity; Nini, a young, disabled girl from an impoverished family, so hungry she eats the flour paste from the backs of political posters; Tong, a child returned to city life from his grandparents' village, whose dog is his only friend and whose greatest desire is to impress others as a dedicated Young Communist; Old Hua and Mrs. Hua, aging street sweepers who in their time adopted seven thrown-away baby girls; Bashi, a half-simple, scorned youth who dwells with his aging grandmother and is determined to learn about sex; Old Kwen, disposer of corpses and much, much worse; Kai, a young wife and mother whose carefully monitored marriage of convenience compounds her suffocation under communism; and Kai's secret friend Jialin, a quiet dissident whose tuberculosis exempts him from societal duties.

To borrow from Langston Hughes (and wildly understate the case), life for these individuals ain't been no crystal stair. They are, at least, resourceful in their adaptations.

Nini "accepted the benevolence of the world, as much as she did its cruelty, just as she was resigned to her body being born deformed." Bashi may leer at young girls, hoping for sexual adventure, but he is also devoted to his old grandmother. Teacher Gu forces himself to accept his daughter's death with passive stoicism - "[T]he only way to live on, he had known for most of his adulthood, was to focus on the small patch of life in front of one's eyes" - while his wife strives "to find a reason for every calamity and failure, as if the world were explainable and life would have to make sense for one to continue living."

Li's prose, memorable for its simplicity and gravity in her fine story collection "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," here rewards readers with that same austere beauty, a style so limpid and spare that when the rare lyrical description occurs, it reverberates: Teacher Gu's wife, at 18, had "hair black and smooth ... cheeks peach-colored, and her eyes two deep pools of sad water."

But the level of misery is so unrelieved and various (and reader perception perhaps so bludgeoned by the past half century's news) that it barely escapes verging on inadvertent satire. This is not to doubt its stomach-dropping authenticity. Platoons of grade-school toddlers bring snacks to the denunciation ceremony of the counterrevolutionary before her execution, held in a giant stadium where festivities begin with everyone singing "Without the Communist Party We Don't Have a Life."

The counterrevolutionary's vocal cords have been cut to prevent her from shouting anti-party slogans during her final exposure to the watching populace. Before she is shot, we will learn, she must suffer horribly more, and even after death, yet more heinous desecration. Li's ability to convey these realities in deliberate, calm diction, and to dwell in characters' minds (and those of tangential, unnamed characters) with thoughtful comprehension, is powerful indeed - possibly what keeps a reader reading.

"The Vagrants" embodies - and majestically indicts - the menace, want and airlessness of life under totalitarian rule, where deprivation is such that for small parcels of relief anyone may report anyone else, and family members are beaten by other family members with a nail-studded plank on a public stage. Certainly it is art's job to bear witness, in ways that enter us to stay, but the risk of reader exhaustion can imperil such efforts. Why and how works of fiction transcend this remain a debate. Though suffering wears bravely individual faces in "The Vagrants," and though some of its paths take surprising turns, a reader may grow numbed, or more strangely (and disturbingly), inured under its assault.

Nonetheless, the novel stands as a testament. Li, who was born in China in 1972 and now lives in Oakland, dedicates it to her parents, who presumably endured or witnessed - as did Li herself - much of what it describes. "What is revolution," wonders a despairing teacher Gu toward the last, "except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?"